At the very start of the company, socialtours.com adapted, modified and endorsed a guideline for travelling responsibly in Nepal. The guideline talks about how travellers can make an impact by reducing their impacts while travelling.

We then worked on a responsible tourism policy, which guides how we work...

The environment has been one of the topics close to the heart at socialtours.com, triggered by a strong belief that this is our chief asset. Using every means to reduce energy consumption and waste is one step in this vast task. socialtours.com plays its part, in small ways. We know the road is long in this process, but we are making slow but steady inroads.

At socialtours.com we believe that tourism is all about cultural exchange, and this is the only way to actually achieve peace in the world. Several of our trips focus therefore on transfer of cultural understanding. However, at another level, socialtours.com works with select organisations worldwide to provide opportunities for volunteers and organisations to come in real contact with people and make a difference in thier lives.

The learning from this work is tremendous for all people involved, the volunteers, the people and organisations they make an impact on, and us as a company working to finding creative ways to fulfill our moral and social obligations to society.

In the summer of 2008, we signed up voluntarily towards an effort at designing a system for custom Responsible Tourism Audits. This was spearheaded by Jenefer Bobbin and Prof. Harold Goodwin, International Center for Responsible Tourism, UK. In 2008, Jenefer spent almost five months with socialtours, studying our RT policy, designing indicators and a system for the collection of data which would enable us to audit ourselves, and then get external mediators to check them.

We believe it is imperative that this is done, so that we find out where we are, and find ways and means as how to improve ourselves on the responsibility front, on a continual basis.